Uncle Neil's Trip Back To The Country

It's been a while that I posted something by Uncle Neil. My re-imagining of Neil Young's classic Harvest as Harvest Time was one of the more popular posts in the early days, the first to creep over a hundred hits. Yay Neil! The old warhorses always sell, even for free! So, time to check back in with Uncle Neil, circa 15 years later for another album that wasn't but could have been...

Making alternate Neil Young albums seems like a singularly fitting activity because a bunch of Young's albums are kinda sorta alternate albums anyway, considering that there are probably a dozen or more unreleased, rejected or withdrawn projects in Uncle Neil's drawers, and that he was never afraid to mix and match stuff from his extensive archive with new recordings. This also means that no Young project or song can be safely placed in the dust bin of Young's musical history because you'll never know when Unce Neil decides to pull out an old, slightly ratty tune, dust it off and put it on an album anyway. Case in point: "Wonderin'", first played in the early 70s as one of his hokey country tunes, but never put on an album, only to emerge an entire decade later as a hokey doo wop tune on Young's rockabilly abomination Everybody's Rockin'. That 24-minute abomination was of course Young's knee-jerk reaction to troubles with Geffen Records who had rejected an earlier album called Old Ways, that didn't resemble the finally released all-country all-the way Old Ways. The original Old Ways was half old-school rockabilly, half old-school country. Which, in a roundabout way brings us to our One Buck Record of the day. 

Neil Young's headlong plunge into straight up country music in the early-to mid-80s was of course preceded by numerous forays into the genre, notably on American Stars'n'Bars and Hawks And Doves. But really, Harvest already dipped into it, and once Young had a foot in the genre he never really left. His early 1980s shenanigans - openly embracing Reaganomics, offering the weird electro record Trans, getting invested in the fate of farmers and Farm Aid - showed again how mercurial and unpredictable Young could be, so how exactly David Geffen could be surprised by what he bought and almost immediately have buyer's remorse is a problem of appreciating his asset. Geffen thought he would get the Harvest hitmaker - not...well...Young, the guy who had always marched to his own drum. 

You probably all know already the details of Young's turbulent tenure at Geffen records (Getting sued for making uncharacteristic music with Trans, subsequently threatening to play only country music until the end of his stay with Geffen), so let's skip ahead a couple of years. Old Ways (version two) has come and gone, Young has gone out with a group dubbed The International Harvesters, Geffen has dropped their lawsuit and gotten a weird, pretty bad synth-rock record (Landing On Water) out of it, while Young was prepping and altering live performances from a tour with Crazy Horse from the year before to publish as Life, his last album for Geffen. But while he was fully back in guitar rock with Crazy Horse, country still wasn't entirely out of his system. So he went into the studio and cut a couple of country tracks, some of them already roadtested with The International Harvesters in 1985. Like a lot of other projects, these songs would get filed away and never see the light of day. "Beautiful Bluebird" got reworked as more of a folk-rock tune for Young's 'sequel' Chrome Dreams II in 2007, proving once again that no Young song is ever truly dead and gone, in terms of being issued or reworked for new purposes. "Nothing Is Perfect" and "Interstate" were prepared for a release on an EP supposed to support Farm Aid that never came out. In short, Young compiled a back log of country tunes that sat around unused and unissued.

Which brings us back to the record of the day: What if Young finally decides in the late-1980s to assemble all the straight country offerings that have fallen to the wayside in the years before? That's how we can end up with My Country, which gathers tracks he cut live with The International Harvesters (issued on the archival A Treaure) and an Old Ways outtake issued on the Geffen Years comp Lucky Thirteen and the above-mentioned outtakes from 1987 plus that beautiful first version of "Interstate" cut for that Farm Aid EP. 

Uncle Neil never much cared for coherence, but the One Buck Guy does, so the work from the Old Ways era, including the lovely tribute to his then-new born daughter "Amber Jean", will take up what would be side one of a vinyl album (tracks 1-5), whereas the 1987 material would fill up most of side two before ending with "Interstate", a perfect album closer. I tried to improve the sound quality of the 1987 demos a bit and - as with all my comps using different sources - volume EQ'd the whole thing for your listening pleasure. Cover photo by Jacob Legge, showing a lake close to Omemee, Ontario where Young spent his childhood. His country, indeed. 

On Harvest, Uncle Neil asked "Are You Ready For The Country?". On Old Ways, he proclaimed to "Get Back To The Country". So, are you all ready to go back to the country with Uncle Neil?